A new species of rupicolous Cnemaspis Strauch, 1887 (Squamata: Gekkonidae) from the Biligirirangan Hills of Southern India

Abstract

We describe a new species of small-sized (SVL 24.6–28.8 mm) rupicolous Cnemaspis from the Biligirirangan Hills (BR Hills), Karnataka based on morphology and molecular (mitochondrial 16S and ND2) data. The new species is nested within the monticola, mysoriensis and gracilis clades, where it is basal to monticola and gracilis clades in the Maximum Likelihood analysis and is basal to the monticola clade in the Bayesian phylogenetic analysis.

A NEW RUPICOLOUS DAY GECKO SPECIES (SQUAMATA: GEKKONIDAE: Cnemaspis) FROM TAMIL NADU, SOUTH INDIA

“…Phylogenetic relationship. The tree topology did not differ from the trees generated in recent studies (Agarwal et al 2022, Narayanan et al 2023. The ML phylogenetic inference based on the ND2 gene (Fig.…”

“…Ltd.). Comparative ND2 sequences comprising members of the Cnemaspis were downloaded from GenBank following Pal et al (2021), Agarwal et al (2022), and Narayanan et al (2022; (see Table 1). Phelsuma ornata Gray, 1825 (EU423282.1); Phelsuma lineata Gray, 1842 (EU423283.1); and Lygodactylus picturatus Peters, 1870 (MZ772396.1) were used as outgroups in the analysis.…”

“…Agarwal et al (2022) described five new species within this clade from the Shevaroy hill massifs drawing attention to the microendemism within the genus. The subsequent description of another new species by Narayanan et al (2022) from the Male Mahadeshwara Wildlife Sanctuary in the Eastern Ghats, raised the total number of species in the gracilis clade to twelve.…”

A new species of the genus Cnemaspis Strauch, 1887 (Squamata: Gekkonidae) from the higher elevations of Tamil Nadu, India

“…Ltd.). Comparative ND2 and 16S sequences comprising members of the Cnemaspis were downloaded from GenBank following (Pal et al 2021;Agarwal et al 2022;Narayanan & Aravind 2022;Narayanan et al 2023;Sayyed et al 2023) and newly generated sequences were deposited in the GenBank® (Benson et al 2017) under accession numbers as per Appendix 1. The sequences were aligned using MUSCLE (Edgar 2004) in MEGA v.7 (Tamura & Nei, 1993, Kumar et al 2016 with default parameter settings.…”